A pediatric therapy company operating in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area. We provide physical, occupational, speech and aquatic therapy services in the most beneficial and convenient setting for you and your child, including our clinic, currently located in San Mateo, your home, school or daycare.

Advanced Spots (for balance and precision)

As I wrote the last blog post, we also turned it into an insta-story (check out our instagram account) and while doing that I had ideas for ways to progress the activities we were talking about. Here are a few of those ways:

Hang balls from strings. You can have the child stand facing the balls, or with the balls to the side, or even to the back. Have them try to kick the ball and return their foot back to where it started. In the picture we have three balls hanging (from our make shift apparatus) but you could start with one if you are just going to work on kicking precision. In fact, after helping record the video for our insta-story one therapist is going to use this with her child today! You could also have multiple or have them hanging all around the person to work on following directions and body awareness. This all helps to work on balance and single leg stance as well. It also helps with grading movement, especially with our slightly unstable set-up (I mean we used a t-ball T stand across a limbo set) because if they kick too hard everything will fall off

Set balls on top of cones or other stabilizing devices. You can either work on kicking them off the cones and returning your foot to the starting place, or you can tap on top. You have to move slowly and be precise with tapping so that the balls don’t roll all over the place! You can make it into a game by seeing how many you can tap before one rolls off. You can also start with just one to keep it simple. You can make it more advanced by adding more and giving commands as to which ball and which foot.

Finally you can use different spots and change up how you are using them. You can have different colors and play twister style by saying which foot taps which color. You can use all the same color and have letters and/or numbers on them to give the same instructions. You can start by using all one foot to increase standing time on the other leg and see how many they can tap when you ask before they have to set their foot down. Get creative!

What are some other ideas you have? I’ll keep you posted if we come up with any more!

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What Clients Are Saying

We have been working with Starfish Therapies over the last year, and my four year-old has made incredible progress in her gross motor development. Stacy has an amazing ability to work with children. She uses her energy, humor and creativity to make children laugh and play, and at the same time work very hard.”

Caroline H.

I could see the progress being made in my son’s communication and overall disposition. Not only were the classes fun, but he also became a lot less frustrated when trying to communicate with others.”